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A few weeks back, I wrote a blog entry lamenting the attitude toward IDEs in the Scala community. A few people told me that the tooling situation was better than I’d implied, so I thought I’d spend a bit of time looking at using Scala (and Lift specifically) in Eclipse. I think the situation is still a ways away from the tooling situation for Java, but it is actually quite good, and I wanted to post a quick tutorial for those interested in developing Lift in Eclipse.

Prerequisites

This post assumes that you already have Scala 2.8 final and Eclipse 3.6 on your system. For Eclipse, I recommend upping the Xmx setting if you haven’t already – I had issues when I had multiple Lift projects imported with Xmx set to 386.

Also, this tutorial is going to use Maven, not SBT. SBT may be a better build tool for Scala projects, but I’m not sure how well it works with m2eclipse – I’m going to play with that more later.

I also assume you know how to install plugins into Eclipse – I will create a more in-depth screencast for doing all of this if there is enough interest.

Now you can create a new Lift project from the Archetype – this is effectively the same as running the mvn archetype:generate command that the Lift ‘Getting Started’ guide tells you to.

To do this, go to File > New > Other… > Maven > Maven Project

Follow the wizard until you get to the Select an Archetype screen. In the Catalog drop-down, select the Scala-Tools.org Catalog. A list of archetypes will appear below – you can filter down to just the Lift projects by typing ‘lift’ in the Filter box. Select one of the Scala 2.8/Lift 2.1 archetypes – I selected lift-archetype-basic_2.8.0. Click next and fill in the information (group id, artifact id, and version), and then click ‘Finish’.

m2eclipse will spend a few minutes setting up your project, downloading sources, and configuring it in Eclipse.

5. Import an existing Lift project (optional)

If you already have a Maven-based Lift project, you can import it. Just select File > Import.. > Maven > Existing Maven Projects and then follow the wizard to import your project. It will configure everything for you.

6. What you can do

So, now that you have a Maven-based Lift project in Eclipse, what can you do?

– Code navigation works quite well – you can CMD/Control + click a class or method to go right to it. Cmd + O will let you navigate the methods and fields in the current class.

– m2eclipse will download sources for you automatically – this is one of my favorite features. If you navigate to a class in the Scala API or Lift itself, you’ll see a rough decompiled view of the class for a second while m2eclips grabs the sources, then it will refresh with the actual source code. This is a really handy feature! It will also download scaladocs for you.

– You can setup an m2eclipse command to run Jetty within the IDE. Right-click on the web project and select ‘Run as…’ > Maven build… You’ll be presented with a screen for creating a new maven runtime configuration. In the Goals box, add jetty:run, then click ‘Run’. This configuration will be saved, so you can run your project in Jetty anytime you want by using the Run button in the menu bar. You can also do this for the mvn scala:cc command if you want.

7. Final thoughts / Feedback

I think the tooling situation for Scala and Lift is pretty good – much better than when I was doing a lot of Lift work last year. A lot of credit goes to Miles Sabin, David Bernard, and others who have done a lot of work to make this possible.

If this post was helpful, please let me know. I’m also interested to know if people are interested in more in this area, specifically:

1) A screencast showing how to do all of this, and what other features are available when working with Scala/Lift projects in Eclipse.

2) A single Eclipse feature that can tie all of the above features together into one easy-to-install package, along with setting up the m2eclipse Run As.. commands automatically for you.

If either of these interest you, or you have any other ideas, please let me know. You can either leave a comment on this post or email me directly (suresk@gmail.com). You may also follow me on Twitter – @suresk.